I just had an awesome week-long vacation visiting home in California with Musetta, seeing a lot of my family (especially my new nephew) and generally having a good time. I get back and I'm already working...

It's really hard, getting back from vacation. I just want to be able to take a month off.

For a while I've thought of Twitter as an amusing, idiot younger sibling of blogs. It doesn't have the ability to form long, complex ideas like blogs, but everyone pays more attention to it because it's new and cute.

Recently, I've been trying to satirize Twitter (using Twitter), and I've discovered that not only is Twitter kind of pointless, it's also terribly written, too.

My first attempt at satire was to create a twitter wherein I'd update once a day with a single letter. My first message was going to be "Drink ovaltine!", in an homage to A Christmas Story, but I was thwarted because 'd' is a reserved command for private messaging. Every time I tried to write the letter 'd' the service gave me a helpful reminder that I needed to enter in someone else's name to send my message to; it never considered that I was simply trying to post just 'd'.

My second attempted started two days ago, wherein I created an account which would contain nothing but the most boring of updates. I know, it's not particularly original (it's what every other Twitter on the planet is) but I made it mostly to mock a specific friend. My account was created, I made a post, then I created an entirely blank white image to set as my avatar. I set it, then bam - I was logged out!

Every time I tried to log back in, Twitter told me I had the wrong username/password. When I tried to view my one update, it said the account didn't exist. And when I tried to recover my password, it said I was purposely locked out of the system. I tried making a second account, and discovered that it was the avatar that was the problem - the moment I added the avatar to my second account, it destroyed that one, too. I didn't realize Twitter hated white pictures so much, but I'm happy to have found an image that will get your account deleted.

However, the next day, my account was back online. Yipee! I made another boring update. But when I went to update today, it said that my account was suspended. Note here how the error screen links a 404 - good job, Twitter. I can't imagine why my account got suspended (I wasn't posting anything more inane than the usual droll) besides the name. Besides, people using names close to mine, who do nothing but spam, have gotten away with it for a long time.

To recap, the failures are:
-Not allowing you to post whatever you want.
-Temporarily deleting accounts if you upload an all-white image as an avatar.
-Suspending accounts for no good reason.
-Linking to 404s.
-Failing to suspend bad accounts.

I had been speculating for a long time how Twitter could possibly turn a profit. I've been joking for a while that their plan is to look sexy and get bought out by a big stupid company (like YouTube or Skype). They'd better hope they get bought soon before everyone realizes they aren't making money.

For reference, if you wanted to read this post via Twitter's 140-character posts, it'd take 24 twitter posts to get these thoughts across. Or just one: "Twitter sucks!"

Tags: technology

I am increasingly frustrated by the explosion of game release rates in the last couple years. I've got a growing list of games to play that rarely gets shorter.

I'm glad I'm not the sort of gamer who buys games before having time to play them (that could get expensive real quick), but I am annoyed by both the time and cost of actually trying to be a gamer who is "up" on things.

Tags: games

A few days ago I was grabbing something from the corner of my closet when I noticed something a little odd. On the floor of my closet were these little beige pellets. As I pulled back the juggling supplies which normally reside there, I discovered that an entire fourth of my closet was carpeted in these small invaders. As I looked into the back corner of my now-cleared closet, I discovered two things:

Two juggling balls, ripped open; and a hole in the wall.

I had occasionally seen some mice a while back crawling around my apartment a few months. I'd even tried setting up a home-made (humane) mousetrap, but it wasn't successful. They stopped bothering me after a few weeks and I figured they had left, since all my food is in high up areas. But now the truth is out - they were actually using the corner of my closet as a nest.

The devastation was actually not to just two juggling balls, but all four. Not content with the bedding provided by the first two, they chewed through my juggling bag to get at the other two juggling balls. So now I'm out four juggling balls and a juggling bag, plus I had to clean up my closet floor of mouse shit. At least it looks like they didn't live there long; there was no evidence that anyone had lived there for a while.

Tags: juggling, minneapolis

I can't stand Minnesota construction. It made the traffic so bad that I had to cancel my plans for tonight, because I wasn't going to drive for three and a half hours.

Tags: minneapolis

Am I the only person who looks at promotions for free stuff and think "today is the day NOT to visit that business"? I like avoid shit like this.

Maybe my opinions on this would be different if I had no money, but I consider the money I lose from not taking advantage of these free promotions as "pandemonium time-off." Not to mention that since time equals money, you're essentially 'making' the amount of money you saved for the time you spent waiting in line (which, given the lines I hear about, come out to about $5 an hour).

Tags: random

I recently needed to refill on minutes for my pay-as-you-go phone, and so I went to a Walmart in California to grab a T-Mobile card. I've never bought minutes this way, but I eventually found the card I was looking for. (Sidenote, buying in $100 increments is the best value for money per minute.) I was a little disturbed at what I noticed on the card while I was buying it:



In addition to that wonderful spelling error, the $100 card only cost me $98.

I wonder if I should be more worried about my T-Mobile plan.

Tags: miscellany

I made a list of pros and cons of having long hair a week ago. Here's what I came up with:

Cons:
-Takes forever to wash.
-Takes forever to dry.
-Makes looking down a hassle.
-Hair gets in everything you're looking at closely, especially food.
-Makes swimming a pain.

Pros:
-I liked how it looked when I walked around on a windy day.

So I decided to get it cut off. I ended up going to Great Clips, where I discovered I'd get a free haircut if I donated to Locks of Love. LoL wasn't my first choice, but for a free haircut and avoiding the hassle of donating the hair myself, why not.

Of course, I have pictures. Here's the "before" pictures:





( And After... )

I haven't posted about this until now mostly because I was sort of creeped out by the whole episode, but I have a follow-up that I need to make about the AAA Woes post I made a few weeks ago.

( The Plot Thickens )

Tags: minneapolis

Does anyone know of a business where one could get a few custom buttons made quickly? I'm trying to make a few Comedian pins before the premiere of the Watchmen movie, but I'm at a loss of how to make the buttons short of buying my own button making machine.

In other news, I'm totally pumped about the Watchmen movie. Going to go see it next weekend at IMAX, which has me doubly excited; even if the movie sucks, it will at least be very big.

Tags: random